42 Days

It appears that the DPP doesn't want it, neither do the previous Attorney General and Lord Chancellor, the police appear by their silence to be at least ambivalent about it and now a past prime minister in what must be his most pointed intervention since leaving office in 1997 has cast grave on yet another restriction on our civil liberties.  Or, as someone wrote during the 90 day fiasco, just pluck another figure out of the air!  So why is the government persisting with the 42 day proposal when it appears most people simply do not see or accept the justification being claimed.  Jacqui Smith has let the cat out of the bag in her Spectator article in which she says that if it were a vote of confidence in the government it would pass easily.  So it's all about macho-politics and the need for the Prime Minister to reassert his authority over his government.  That's no justification for policy.

The government's case appears to be this.  We might in the future need to keep a suspect without charge in custody beyond the current inflated 28 days so that we can collect evidence, so it's a valid insurance policy.  There is an old adage that says 'work expands to fill the time available' so if it's 42 days you can guarantee that, despite the spurious parliamentary safeguards, the time will be used.  Then there's the argument that we need to balance civil liberties with the need to combat the 'war on terror'.  Now that's a better position to take but has been fatally flawed by the use local authorities have made of anti-terrorism legislation to snoop on people who appear to be lying about where they live to get their children into the schools of their choice.  Whatever the justification of checking on those individuals who try to buck the system for their own or their families benefit, using anti-terrorism legislation to do this resembled the proverbial hammer and nut. 

Government of whatever hue appears to be under the impression that you can legislate problems away.  Whether it's knife crime or binge drinking or rubbish bins, the first inclination of government appears to be to head for the statute book.  Law only works effectively with consent and increasingly it appears that many people do not consent to having their behaviour changed by ham-fisted and often badly drafted legislation.  By legislating too much, government dilutes the value of all legislation, good or otherwise.  We should be legislating less rather than trying to micro-manage people's lives.  Yes, government should inform, advise and warn people.  It should pass legislation where necessary but defining personal responsibility in terms of legislation and not allowing individuals to take responsibility for their own actions will mean that increasingly legislative and personal responsibility will merge, the ultimate political control.

If there is justification for 42 days other than it might be needed, then the government should present it.  Global terrorism is real and needs to be combated since it threatens the fundamental values of a democratic society.  By increasing the powers of the state and reducing the liberties that have been won over centuries, we are in danger of doing the terrorists' job for them.  We are already have more camera surveillance than any country on the globe, our anti-terrorism legislation is seen as increasingly draconian and is increasingly being misused by officials who appear not to be accountable to anyone and we appear, in many people's eyes to be sleepwalking into a police state.  In these circumstances, macho-politics is inappropriate, offensive and dangerous.  Think again, Gordon.

Punishment: introduction

Between 1830 and 1914 there were three major changes in the ways convicted offenders were treated:

1. There was a shift from death or transportation as the major punishment for felonies to imprisonment in custom-built prisons[1].
2. There was a shift, admittedly less marked, from the personnel of the courts making all key decisions about the offender to the experts in the new prison system making some of these decisions.
3. Once it was agreed that most offenders should be sent to prison, the crucial arguments centred on to what extent prisons were places of punishment or reformation.

The traditional view of changes in punishment accepts that the 'Bloody Code' was arbitrary and savage and that the reformers' stance was moral unassailable. Penal reform began with the abolition of capital statutes urged by Romilly and Mackintosh and largely carried out by Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell when Home Secretaries in the 1820s and 1830s. It gathered pace as the government took an increasing role in the organisation and supervision of prisons with the opening of Millbank in 1816 and Pentonville in 1842, with the creation of the prison Inspectorate in 1835 and the centralisation of the whole system under the Home Office in 1877. Revisionist historians accept the savagery of the 'Bloody Code' but have been more subtle in assessing its arbitrariness and see the emergence of the new prison system as a further institutional solution to the need for social control and discipline like the workhouse established under the new Poor Law. In many respects the arguments of traditionalists and revisionists are the mirror image of each other. In the traditional Whig view the humanitarian and progressive nature of penal reform fits with the humanitarian and progressive requirements of the liberal democratic society that emerged in the early nineteenth century. In the revisionist account there is a fit between the new system of prison and punishment and the control requirements of the developing capitalist system.

 

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[1] The most vivid revisionist study on prisons is Michael Ignatieff A Just Measure of Pain: the penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850, Macmillan, 1978. J.A.Sharpe Judicial Punishment in England, Faber, 1990 covers a broader span of time. V.A.C. Gatrell The Hanging Tree. Execution and the English People 1770-1868, OUP, 1994 is a major study of changing sensibilities and debunks many myths about execution.

Offences against the person

It was offences against the person that provided the most spectacular and terrifying images of criminality in this period. For example, the metropolitan garrotting panics[1] of the mid 1850s and 1862-3, that set a trend for describing a variety of robberies in London and the provinces, as 'garrotting' and the butchery of Jack the Ripper in East London in the autumn of 1888 reverberated outside London.

At the popular level there were newspapers devoted to crime and this helped to feed people’s interest. There were few restrictions on reporting. Artists were used to draw scenes from the crime. This allowed them to print the kind of pictures we are not allowed to show as photographs today. Madame Tussauds opened in 1802 and had popular waxworks of criminals, especially murderers. Murder featured a great deal perhaps because it was, from the 1860s, the only capital offence. There was huge public interest in celebrated nineteenth century horror crimes, like the Radcliffe Highway murders of 1811 when two families were battered to death, the activities of the poisoner William Palmer in the mid-1850s and the Ripper murders of 1888.

But these were the dramatic exception rather than the norm. The statistics show that the number of murders was static at about 400 a year. Then, as now, most murders took place in the family. A breakdown of assaults taken before Bedfordshire magistrates every five years between 1750 and 1840 shows that

1. There were very high numbers of assaults on women of which a third were attacks by husbands on their wives. Only a third of this type of assault were prosecuted on indictment.
2. There were a significant number of attacks on authority in the shape of constables or overseers of the poor. By contrast, some 85 per cent of these attacks led to prosecution.

Offences against the person made up over 10 per cent of committals made on indictment during the period 1834 and 1914 and about 15 per cent of summary committals in the second half of the century. Assaults on authority, in the shape of policemen formed a significant percentage of nineteenth century assaults and declined at a slower rate than common assault: 15 per cent of summary prosecutions in the 1860s rising to about 21 per cent in the 1880s. Most assaults were for resisting or obstructing the police in their duty.

1. In Victorian England the homicide rate reached 2 per 100,000 of the population only once [in 1865]. Generally, it hovered about 1.5 per 100,000 falling to rarely more than 1 per 100,000 at the end of the 1880s and declining even further after 1900. This meant that between 1857 and 1890 there were rarely more than 400 homicide reported to the police each year, and during the 1890s the average was below 350.
2. These figures do not take into account the significant number of infanticides that went undetected.
3. Murders were normally committed by either relatives or by persons known to the victim. Murders by strangers or by burglars were exceptional though they were widely and luridly reported in newspapers.

Homicide is regarded as a most serious offence and it is probably reported more than other forms of crime. The statistics for homicide are therefore probably closer to the real level of the offence.

Two points are worth further discussion.  First, the incidence of violence within the family. Physical punishment seems to have been accepted or at least tolerated across social groups until well into the nineteenth century. Yet there were limits. Ill-treatment leading to death was exceptional but even here courts could find mitigating circumstances: Frederick Gilbert was acquitted of the manslaughter of his wife after the court noted that he was a good, sober man and his wife a drunkard. There appears to have been a decline in violence between working class men and women in the third quarter of the century, possibly because of growing respectability and rising living standards that reduced stress on the male as the principal economic provider. Perhaps also the cult of respectability made wives even less likely to complain since such assaults were shameful and in the growing suburbs they were less public, less likely to disturb the neighbours, while the bruising was less visible than on the crowded stair of a tenement. In addition there was the extent to which courts and the police were prepared to accept the uncorroborated word of the beaten wife.

Secondly, the link between drink and violence. Drink was often a cause of violence in the family, and outside. Some Victorian temperance reformers gave drink as the fundamental cause of all crime[2]. Others were less zealous and suggested only a connection between crimes of violence and drink. There is some evidence to suggest that there were slight increases in figures for assault and drunkenness during years of prosperity: high wages and high employment led to a greater consumption of alcohol that, in turn, contributed to more violent crime. However, in the last quarter of the century the overall trend is markedly downwards. This may be explained, in part, by which contemporaries perceived as the civilisation or moralisation of the population. Perhaps also there was a decrease in anxiety about small-scale, drink-related violence.

There seems to be an interplay between criminal statistics and periodic fears of crime and disorder and it is probable that the collection and publication of national crime figures led to the perception of crime as a national and impersonal problem. Statistics made crime national and made the criminal a national figure. Crime could be shown to be offences perpetrated on a large scale against respectable people by a group that, by being measured statistically, could be defined collectively as criminals or as the 'criminal class'.

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[1] In July 1863 Hugh Pilkington, an MP was garrotted and robbed in central London. This led to a ‘garrotting scare’. There were 12 more recorded cases in October and 32 in November. Maybe the press reports of the original case led criminals to copy the tactic. Maybe the police or the public labelled certain kinds of robbery ‘garrottings’ that they would not previously have done.

[2] On the issue of drink and the temperance movement see Brian Harrison Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872, Faber, 1971, revised edition, Keele University Press, 1994 and W.R. Lambert Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales, University of Wales Press, 1984. V. Berridge and G. Edwards Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth Century England, Yale, 1987 is the best study of the impact of drugs.

Offences against property

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw major changes in Britain. This was bound to have an impact on crime. Highway robbery died out as roads became less isolated with more traffic, more patrols and more turnpike gates. A new crime was robbing travellers on the railways, especially before the introduction of corridor trains. Huge business venture, operating with little supervision, provided opportunities for crooked dealings and the development of white-collar crime. Many investors lost money in the 1840s railway fraud scandal. In 1882 over a £1 million was embezzled from Jardine Matheson and in 1897 millions were embezzled from Baring Brothers Bank. Both crimes were hushed up.

The sharp increase in crime figures after 1825 that continued until mid-century is well known, though not thoroughly explained. The increase in population was enormous during these years but it was well below the increase measured in crime statistics. Moreover the crime increase seems to have been as marked in rural counties like Bedfordshire as it was overall. What is noticeable about the peaks in crime -- from 1825 to a peak in 1832, a decline followed by another upswing to a peak in 1842 and again in 1848 -- is that they coincide with years marked by economic depression and political unrest. The correlation suggests that:

• Victims might have been more ready to prosecute because of the general feeling of insecurity.
• Offenders were more likely to steal because of economic hardship. Peaks of committals coincided with the depths of economic depressions and suggest that some offenders stole to survive.
• Political unrest weakened some of the usual factors that discouraged crime.
• The number of new magistrates increased from about 300 per year in 1820 to 400 by 1830. More active JPs meant more men available to hear complaints and issue warrants. Effective prosecution of crime increased.

Britain's propertied classes felt themselves under attack from two directions.

1. From the potential of revolution exported from the continent. The French Revolution began in 1789. There was a further revolution in France in 1830. There were revolutions across other parts of Europe in 1830 and 1848. These created considerable fear that the same thing would happen in Britain. The late 1830s and early 1840s were years of acute anxiety fed by the economic depression as well as by radical and industrial agitation culminating in the Plug Plots in 1842 and the Kennington Common meeting in 1848.
2. Secondly from the growing slums of urban Britain. As towns grew, and the slum areas expanded the middle classes felt that they were losing control of these inner-city areas. Many people were convinced by the writings of Malthus and his pessimistic picture of the poor implying that it was their own improvidence and immorality that led to problems of over population, food shortage and, consequently, high poor rates.

Larceny statistics in the second half of the century also show some link between the peaks of offences and years of high unemployment. But, after the 'hungry forties', the working classes rarely had to contend with the coincidence of high food prices and economic depression that was so marked in the first half of the century. This was due, in part, to a rise in the export market for industrial goods that enabled firms to offset short-term contractions in the home market. At the same time stable, even declining food prices helped many section of the working class to ride out short periods of unemployment. These elements help to explain the overall decline in theft and violence: put at its simplest, during this period the poor became less habituated to theft because they were less subjected to periods of severe unemployment coinciding with serious subsistence problems. In addition the growth and professionalism of the new police force probably acted as a deterrent; the destruction of the rookeries for urban improvement removed some of the worst criminal areas; the Vagrancy Acts meant a stricter supervision of the casual poor.

A 'criminal class'?

Today we are concerned about 'organised crime'. In the nineteenth century contemporaries debated the existence of professional criminals and the rather less precise 'criminal classes', a notion given credence by the collection and publication of statistics. People believed that it was possible to identify ‘criminals’ by the way they looked. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Rural Constabulary 1839 attempted to explain crime across England and Wales. Edwin Chadwick largely drafted it. Criminality was rooted in the poorer classes, especially those who roamed the country: 'the prevalent cause of vagrancy was the impatience of steady labour'. Chadwick and his fellow commissioners were either unaware of, or simply ignored the seasonal nature of much nineteenth century employment and the need of many, even urban dwellers, to spend time moving from place to place and from job to job. Poverty and indigence did not lead to crime, the Report insisted. Criminals suffered from two vices:

1. 'Indolence (laziness) or the pursuit of easy excitement'.
2. They were drawn to commit crimes by 'the temptation of the profit of a career of depredation, as compared with the profits of honest and even well paid industry'.

Criminals made a rational decision to live by crime because of its attractions.

Identifying a criminal class?

Chadwick and other reformers identified a criminal group within the working class. This group possessed the worst habits of the class as a whole. These habits were then given as the causes of crime. The issue was one of 'bad' habits and vices. The 1834 Select Committee enquiring into drunkenness concluded that the 'vice' was declining among the middle and upper classes but increasing among the labouring classes with a notable impact on crime. Employment and good wages led to greater consumption of alcohol that, on occasions, contributed to a greater incidence of offences against the person. The problem, the Committee concluded, was the poor's lack of morality.

1. 'Lack of moral training' was not a new issue in 1834, but it was taken up and emphasised by several educational reformers in the next two decades especially as concern grew about juvenile delinquency
2. Individuals like Mary Carpenter, John Wade and James Kay-Shuttleworth argued that proper education would lead to a reduction of crime but that it was not secular education merely involving reading, writing and arithmetic that they wanted. Jelinger Symons explained that[1]: 'When the heart is depraved, and the tendencies of the child or the man are unusually vicious, there can be little doubt that instruction per se, so far from preventing crime, is accessory to it.'
3. What was needed was Christian and moral education that would explain to the working classes their true station in life. This education had to instil in the young habits of industry. If bad parents or the efforts of ragged schools or Sunday Schools failed to do this, then reformatory schools would have to take over. Jelinger Symons again: ‘.... There must be a change of habit as well as of mind, and the change of habit mostly needed is from some kind of idleness to some kind of industry. We are dealing with a class whose vocation is labour; and whose vices and virtues are infallibly connected with indolence and industry.'

A dangerous class?

The 1830s and especially the 'hungry forties' saw ominous visions of society shared by people at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Friedrich Engels, the left wing writer wrote that 'the incidence of crime has increased with the growth of the working-class population and there is more crime in Britain than in any other country in the world'.  Crime was an aspect of the new social war that worsened with every passing year. In the 1840s the Chartist G.W.M. Reynolds published the fictional The Mysteries of London that gave his readers a frightening portrait of a brutalised, savage poor, a truly dangerous class. The middle classes in England readily accepted this view of their social inferiors if nothing else because the poor looked very different in physique as well as dress.

Between the 1850s and the 1870s a succession of middle class commentators, as often as not guided by local policemen penetrated the dark and teeming recesses of working class districts. They then wrote up their exploits for the delight of the reading public as journeys into criminal districts where the inhabitants were best compared with Red Indians or varieties of black 'savages'. Such literature is at its best in the writings of Henry Mayhew. He was a reporter for the Morning Chronicle, who incorporated his findings in the massive, four volume London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Conditions and Earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work and those that will not work between 1851 and 1861-2.  Mayhew noted the different physical and mental characteristics of the nomadic street people:

1. 'There is a greater development of the animal than of the intellectual and moral nature of man.... They are more or less distinguished for their high cheek-bones and protruding jaws -- for their use of a slang language -- for their lax ideas of property -- for their general improvidence -- their repugnance to continuous labour -- their disregard of female honour -- their love of cruelty -- their pugnacity -- and their utter want of religion.'
2. In short these 'exotic people' lacked all of the virtues that respectable middle class Victorian society held dear.
3. Lurking among these people there was a separate 'class' of thieves who were mainly young, idle and vagrant and who enjoyed the literature that glorified pirates and robbers.
4. In the fourth volume of London Labour, first published in 1861-2, Mayhew concentrated on 'the Non-Workers, or in other words, the Dangerous Classes of the Metropolis'. This was a work by several authors. Mayhew himself set out to define crime and the 'criminal class'. Crime, he argued, was the breaking of social laws in the same way that sin and vice broke religious and moral laws.

From the middle of the century many commentators confidently asserted that crime was being checked. There remained, however, an irredeemable, residuum that, with the end of transportation, could no longer be shipped out of the country. This group was increasingly called the criminal class: the backbone of this class was those defined by Mayhew as 'professional' and by the legislators as 'habitual' criminals. The Times commented in a leading article in 1870 that these men: 'Are more alien from the rest of the community than a hostile army, for they have no idea of joining the ranks of industrious labour either here or elsewhere. The civilised world is simply a carcass on which they prey, and London above all, is to them a place to sack.'

James Greenwood, a journalist, noted that many juveniles resorted to crime because of hunger, yet in general habitual criminals were rarely perceived as bring brought to crime by poverty. Bad, uncaring parents, drink, the corrupt literature that glamorised offenders and the general lack of moral fibre continued to be wheeled out as the causes of crime. The problem that contemporaries had was to explain the persistence of crime in spite of the advantages and opportunities provided by the advance of civilisation and the expansion of the mid-century panacea of education. The old stand-bys of corrupting literature etc. were combined with the mixing of first-time offenders with recidivists in prisons, concepts of hereditary and ideas drawn from the development of medical science:

• Early in the century phrenologists[2] had visited prisons to make case studies of convicts in the belief that inordinate mental faculties led to crime. A visitor to Newgate prison in the 1830s said the prisoners had ‘animal faces’.
• From 1850 doctors like James Thompson, who worked in Perth prison, began collecting biological analyses of convicts, thus providing an academic veneer to these perceptions of 'animal propensities' by the supposedly foolproof means of empirical research.
• The work of Charles Booth[3] in the 1880s and 1890s, with its exposure of bad housing and inadequate diet, encouraged a perception of the residuum as the product of the inevitable workings of social Darwinism. Arnold White, who in the 1900s was the central figure in warning the public about the degeneration of the British race, first expressed his concerns in the 1880s.
• The fundamental problem was not class but 'degeneracy' and hereditary and urban environment were to keys to understanding. Degeneracy was inherited or could be acquired when an individual adopts and deliberately persisted in a life of crime. The problem was made worse by the highly concentrated population of cities that led to the 'creation of a large degenerate caste'.

There are two implicit elements about the perceptions of the criminal class explored so far:

1. The criminal class was perceived as overwhelmingly male.
2. The perceptions were those of middle class commentators who had in mind, if not the middle classes, at least a 'respectable' audience.

There were occasional references to women committing crimes, even to them being afflicted by criminal 'diseases', but in general, they were seen as appendages to thieves. There was, however, a parallel between perceptions of the male criminal and the female prostitute. Prostitution was not in itself a criminal offence, but there was growing concern about 'the Great Social Evil' and from 1850 determined attempts at control. Dr William Acton's Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, in London and Other Large Cities did not see prostitution as the slippery slope of damnation and noted that young women often became prostitutes only for a short while[4]. But there are significant parallels between his list of the causes of prostitution and the causes of crime among the criminal and/or dangerous classes: 'Natural desire. Natural sinfulness. The preferment of indolent ease to labour. Vicious inclinations strengthened and ingrained by early neglect, or evil training, bad associates, and an indecent mode of life. Necessity, imbued by the inability to obtain a living by honest means consequent on a fall from virtue. Extreme poverty. To this blacklist must be added love of drink, love of dress, love of amusement.'

Was there a criminal class?

There were individuals and groups – people who we would today call ‘professional criminals’ -- who made a significant part of their living from crime. However, the word 'class' implies a larger number and a more homogeneous group than actually existed. Since the great majority of offenders came from one social class it was logical to locate the causes of crime within what were generally perceived as the vices of this class. But this was a middle class view of the problem that arose as much from fear and a slanted reading of criminal statistics. There are major problems with the whole idea of a ‘criminal class’.

1. The statistics and court records suggest that the overwhelming majority of thefts reported and prosecuted were opportunist and petty; most incidents of violence against the person involved people who were either related or who were known to each other.
2. The working classes were more commonly the victims of crime and felt more insecure and more likely to be victims in inner city areas than members of the middle classes.
3. As Clive Emsley commented 'The notion of a criminal class was indeed remains, a convenient one for insisting that most crime was something committed on law-abiding citizens by an alien group.' Closer examination of this concept reveals it to be spurious. Work on the Black Country and London shows that no clear distinction can be made between a dishonest criminal class and a poor, but honest, working class. The number of 'habitual criminals' in the 1870s was perhaps no more than 4,000. The scale of the problem was perhaps considerably less than the middle classes believed.

Most thefts and most crimes of violence were not the work of professional criminals. Nor is it helpful to think of these offences as committed by a group that can, in any meaningful sense, be described as a class.

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[1] Jelinger C. Symons Special Report on Reformatories in Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Monmouthshire and in Wales, printed in the Minutes of the Parliamentary Committee on Education, Parliamentary Papers, 1857-58, page 236.

[2] Phrenology developed in the early nineteenth century. It was based on ‘feeling’ the bumps on a person’s skull. By doing this phrenologists believed they could draw conclusions about the individual’s personality.

[3] Charles Booth produced a seventeen-volume study of the London poor between 1886 and 1905.

[4] There is a growing literature on prostitution. The best starting point is Judith Walkowitz Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, CUP, 1980 and Paul MacHugh Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform, Croom Helm, 1980 deal specifically with the debate on the Contagious Diseases Acts. Linda Mahood The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the nineteenth century, Routledge, 1990, Eric Trudgill Madonnas and Magdalens: The origin and development of Victorian sexual attitudes, Heinemann, 1976 and Frank Mort Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral politics in England since 1830, Routledge, 2^nd ed., 1998 provide valuable background. Philippa Levine 'Rough usage: prostitution, law and the social history', in A.Wilson (ed.) Rethinking social history: English society 1570-1920 and its interpretation, Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 266-292 provides a good synthesis. Trevor Fisher Prostitution and the Victorians, Sutton, 1997 is a useful collection of sources.

Towards the disciplinary state

Victorian observers were struck by their grandparents' relative indifference to crime as a 'problem' and by their relative satisfaction with the harsh means used to control it. This was not because of the infrequency of crime. It is not at all clear that there was less thieving and violence per capita in eighteenth than in nineteenth century cities. But crime did not as yet appear to threaten hierarchy and the terms in which crime might be debated as a 'problem' were not yet formed.

The word 'crime', when used at all before the 1780s usually referred to a personal depravity. Slowly, however, the government’s relative tolerance of and indifference to the criminal poor, as of the riotous poor, were eroded. When Sir Robert Peel took up the challenge of prison, police and law reform when he was Home Secretary in the 1820s, the political and cultural climate had changed.  Crime was fast becoming 'important' and was something that government could not ignore. The result was that government increasingly played a dominant role in determining what was crime, hoe crimes should be tried and what sentences should be given to those found guilty.

From 1815 to the 1840s, crime was a way for expressing mounting anxieties about issues that really had little to do with crime. These were how society could cope with change and the stability of the social hierarchy. These issues invested crime with new meanings, justified action against it, and have determined attitudes to it ever since[1].

'Change'

Before 1830, 'change' was not normally identified as an independent force. For those who considered the social costs of economic, urban and population growth after 1830, four major problems were identified:

1. 'The natural progress of barbarian habits'.
2. The 'explosive violence' of the poor.
3. The collapse of family life.
4. The spread of poverty.

The ways in which these four issues were seen was through middle class eyes. The criminal quickly assumed a privileged position in this list of bogeys. Fears about all these imprecise problems were transferred on to the 'criminal', who was visible and threatening. The main reasons why the criminal was specially targeted in these debates are:

• From 1805 the official statistics showed that crime was increasing alarmingly. They provided support for the notion that the moral condition of England was deteriorating and that crime was the symbol of that deterioration.
• We know now that what was increasing after 1830 was not crime itself but the prosecution rate, a very different matter. The issue was one of increasing discipline, especially towards the poor. Both the pauper and the criminal had moral failing: both wilfully refused to enter the respectable community of work. Laziness, not hunger or environment explained theft and pauperism alike and why both were apparently increasing.
• Statistics showing crime rates were used then, as they still are today, to inflame unreal fears and to give shape to imagined problems. Moreover, on to crime were projected anxieties about social changes that had nothing directly to do with crime itself. A critical displacement occurred when 'change' became part of the explanation of crime, and embedded in a broad thesis of social deterioration. By the 1840s this motif was firmly in place. The growth of towns; working class political awareness; the employment of women and the alleged erosion of 'family values' resulting from it; industrial employment and the false values it induced in those who lived by it -- fear of all these things were transferred to fear of crime and criminals..

A typical argument can be seen in Blackwood's Magazine in 1844[2]. It stated that 'Crime in England has increased 700 per cent: in Ireland about 800 per cent, and in Scotland above 3,500 per cent.... What is destined to be the ultimate fate of a country in which the progress of wickedness is so much more rapid than the increase in the number of the people? .... The restraints of character, relationship and vicinity are.... lost in the [urban] crowd ....[they must generate a criminal class] a dismal substratum, a hideous black band of society [from which already] nine-tenths of the crime and nearly all the professional crime....flows.'

Propaganda of this kind was less concerned to analyse crime than to mobilise anxieties about change that in many instances had no necessary or proven criminal implications at all. As the nineteenth century progressed, the metaphors of disease, cancer, contamination and contagion were used to describe ‘crime’. Attention shifted from the individual crime to its symbolic meaning and the pathological nature of the criminal.

This is not to say that the perceived problems in criminality did not change during the second half of the nineteenth century. The image of the dangerous classes was seen, for example, in Mayhew and in the Royal Commission on Penal Servitude 1863. This gave way to an even sharper discrimination between the opportunistic and the professional criminal. In debates on reformatories distinctions between young offenders and the hardened habitual criminal were clarified. In the later nineteenth century the necessitous thief was to be distinguished from the irremediable 'moral defective'. However, the old core images remained intact. 'Crime' was still a metaphor for 'change' and 'the decay of moral values'. Old issues still worried people. Only the language got fancier.

'Order'

Nineteenth century thinking on crime became entangled in a second set of associations, clustered around the notion of 'order'. Established society was perceived to be under threat. Population was growing and was increasingly unruly. Criminals were the 'enemies within', a threat to social order itself and especially property.

Property remained the reference point in the nineteenth century. 'Order', indeed it was only a Victorian euphemism for it. The state was seen as property's bastion and ally against the threat to the elite from the urban working classes. An early indication of this can be seen in the Royal Commission on the Criminal Law 1839 that stated 'A scale of crimes may be found, of which the first degree should consist of those which immediately tend to the dissolution of society, and the last, of the smallest possible injustice done to a private member of society.... It is manifest that all specific laws for the security of persons or property would be unavailing, unless the die operation of such laws were protected by imposing efficient restraints upon forcible violations of public order.'

Edwin Chadwick campaigned for a national and centralised police force by offering the public a fair exchange. Liberty was reduced, but security gained. Police campaigners argued that the principle of liberty was derived from the principle of order. Liberty was what was left over when order was guaranteed. Fears that the state might erode liberty were irrelevant when the greatest threat to liberty could now be defined as the criminal disorder of the urban working classes.

The 'Policeman-state'

‘Change' and perceived threats to public 'order' became criteria against which the actions and policies of the state could be justified and judged. The consequence was the emergence of a 'disciplinary discourse' out of which the idea of the disciplinary or 'policeman state' emerged[3]. The debate was, and still is, between apologists and agents of the centralising process. What were the best sources of order? 'Social policing'? Education? Paternalism? An extension of the vote? Local control? Central authority? At its heart were differing values on competing principles: efficiency and order on the one hand, and economy, liberty, local autonomy and tradition on the other.

The expansion of the modern state was first made clear through the progressive erosion of the older discretionary procedures at law, and of the individual and communal sanctions, many of them extra-legal, that had been sufficient to maintain order in the early nineteenth century. This 'disciplinary' state had a more powerful presence in working class life than the more benign state that began to take an interest in factories, sanitation and education.

In the early nineteenth century it was clear that the collaboration on which the state might increasingly have to rest its legitimacy if a class-divided society was to hold together was not going to be an easy thing to construct. Too many of the poor were incapable of entering into a working relationship with a free government, let alone with a free market, as elites conceived those things. A few refused to enter into either relationship and adopted a revolutionary attitude towards the state. Those who dissented from prevailing norms had always been penalised but in the nineteenth century they acquired the label of the 'enemies within'. In two ways, the development of policing very early on affected the way of containing them:

1. The development of the police meant that the use of the military after the Chartist era tended to become confined to the regulation of industrial disputes.
2. The growing skills of crowd control by the police enabled government to discard the symbolic sledgehammer assault on seditious speaking in favour of deploying a more economical but broader restricting power at the point of dissident meeting. In 1800 you could peaceably assemble where you liked but not say what you wanted. By 1900 you could say what you wanted (subject to the laws of libel) but certainly could not assemble where you liked. This realignment of the law can be seen in the statistics. Trials for sedition dwindled from 1,725 between 1838 and 1848 to virtually nil after 1888. By contrast there was an increase in riot trials by 34 per cent between the 1840s and 1860s and trials for the offence of common law riot rose by 30 per cent between the 1840s and 1890s.

Parallel to the development of the disciplinary state was the construction of 'consent' and consensus. At the heart of this process was the notion of 'respectability' that established acceptable social norms and delineated the boundaries between criminal and non-criminal behaviour.

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[1] Martin J. Wiener Reconstructing The Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England 1830-1914, CUP, 1990 examines the ways in which early Victorian policymakers transformed the Hanoverian criminal justice system. The reformed system was more punitive and more uniform and was founded on notions of free will, rationality and individual self-responsibility. Legal punishment was reconstituted to transform wilful savages into self-disciplined citizens and to promote the development of character and respectability throughout the whole population. In the late nineteenth century punishment underwent a second reconstruction from disciplinary character building to a therapeutic management of damaged or inadequate human material.

[2] Anonymous 'Causes of the Increase of Crime', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 56, 1844.

[3] Law and order ideologues like Chadwick in the 1830s down to present-day home secretaries and chief constables have not always had it their own ways. Debate has been vigorous enough in Britain to ensure that they did not have all the running.

Nineteenth century crime: sources

Victorian crime can be examined through three main sources[1]. Annual statistical returns have been published as Parliamentary Papers since 1805; a wide range of contemporary literary sources offer comment on criminal behaviour and provide valuable insights into Victorian concepts of crime; the formal records of court proceedings can often be supplemented by local newspapers.

Criminal statistics

Annual returns were significantly expanded and improved in the mid-1830s and the late 1850s. Before 1837 the figures related only to national committals for indictable offences but after that statistics at both national and county level were introduced for indictable and summary offences. The County and Borough Police Act 1856 presented the statistics by police districts, thus facilitating regional study. A number of changes occurred in 1893, the most important of which was the change from a year ending on 29 September to one coincident with the calendar year. There are certain problems in using statistics:

1. Particular administrative districts do not necessarily provide the most useful base from which to study crime. Counties contained extremely varied social and economic characteristics that render the search for conclusive explanation difficult if not impossible
2. There are difficulties with the categories used by compilers of statistics
3. Changes in policing could affect the statistics of crime. The establishment of new police forces from the 1830s almost invariably produced local increases in the number of people committed for public order offences like drunk and disorderly and vagrancy. Directives to individual police forces to clamp down on one offence could produce sudden peaks in local statistics. For example in the year 1867-8 105 vagrants were apprehended in Bedfordshire but the figure the following year was 291 falling back to 117 in 1869-70
4. Changes in the law could also affect the statistics. New laws also meant new crimes. The Education Act 1870 resulted in over 96,000 parents being brought before the courts in the first year and allegedly half a million were prosecuted in the first twenty years of the legislation.
5. There is a difference between 'official' crime, as found in statistics, and 'total' crime or actual crimes committed

In the light of these problems, it has been argued that the annual statistics are worthless for the study of criminal activity, though a strong case for their value as a source has been made.

Literary sources

Most of the conceptions of crime in Victorian England were the 'official' and perhaps essentially middle class views of politicians, civil servants, clergymen, magistrates and law officers. Consequently, the literary sources offer a narrow and biased view of the problem. Furthermore, since law is created, and therefore crime defined, by the ruling elite, it can be argued that all law must reflect its prejudices and protect its privileges. Popular fiction and drama in, for example, the 1830s and 1840s, including Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, highlighted and seemed to support important aspects of the factual discussion on crime:

1. The perception that crime existed in a world of its own. This criminal ‘world’ mirrored the respectable world as a nightmare mirrors the day world. Moral issues were very clear and criminality was dramatically at war with virtue
2. The youthfulness of the criminal world.
3. Many of these works were characterised by a fascination with and an intense horror of violence.

This did not mean that the whole of society agreed about the law that defined crime. Legislation against trade unions and poaching are two of the more obvious examples of class law. It is, however, debatable whether laws can run too far ahead of public opinion. To argue that all law was class-based is to ignore the fact that most crime was committed against members of the working classes.

Court and police records

The principal courts involved in the prosecution of crime were the Court of Assize and the Court of Quarter Sessions. In all cases, it is normal to find registers of cases and files associated with specific prosecutions. Increasingly during the century, the Court of Petty Sessions emerged to deal with minor offences at the local level, but they were not courts of record and the survival of any materials is likely to be fortuitous.  The survival rate of local constabulary records varies, but, at their best they offer valuable insights into official attitudes to crime through chief constables' quarterly and annual reports to Quarter Sessions, the papers and minute books of Police Committees and the records of occurrence books.

Given that most, and from 1857-8, all of the statistical and official sources refer to local and regional units, much of the research has been carried out at that level[2]. Taking the various sources available the following pattern emerges[3]:

1. The eighteenth century saw a significant ‘crime wave’. Contemporary writers all commented on the increase in theft and violence. As a result a large number of small offences were made hanging offences. This became known as the ‘Bloody Code’.
2. The steep rise in theft and assault continued after 1825 at a steady rate until the late 1840s. For the second half of the century there was a gradual decline in theft and violence, though housebreaking and burglary remain at a constant and proportionally higher level
3. The most common crime -- well over half and often more than three-quarters -- throughout the period was small-scale theft
4. The great majority of offenders -- generally three in four -- were male and there was a strong concentration of young men in their teens and twenties

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[1] The best introduction to statistics is V. Gattrell and T.B. Hadden 'Criminal statistics and their interpretation' in E.A. Wrigley (ed.) Nineteenth Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of History, CUP, 1972 but see also the discussion in J.J. Tobias.

[2] D. Phillips Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835-60, Croom Helm, 1977 is one of the most successful in combining the types of records from separate jurisdictions.

[3] There are parallels between the Victorian experience and the current experience and perception of crime.

The context and nature of crime

During this period of a century and a half Britain underwent major changes. These are normally associated with the Industrial Revolution. It is important to keep the following points in mind when looking at this issue.

1. In 1750 England had a total population of around 6 million people. By 1901 this had risen to over 30 million. In 1750 about a quarter of the total population lived in towns and cities. By 1901 this had risen to three out of every four people. This process of urbanisation put considerable strains on existing systems of law enforcement. It saw the gradual end of the face-to-face society of early modern England. Town life was more anonymous. By the mid-nineteenth century most people lived and worked in towns and cities. This concentrated population.
2. The French Revolution, which began in 1789, created considerable fear among the ruling classes that a similar revolution would take place in Britain. The working classes did not have the vote and their demands were seen as ‘revolutionary’ even when they were reasonable. Activities, like food riots that in the early modern period were seen as crimes were now defined as revolutionary.  The authorities increasingly feared the working classes as a threat to public order. As a result even small crimes were punished harshly.
3. There were important changes in attitude towards crime and punishment.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the ground-rules of conduct and behaviour were laid down by the Law and government policy, but the actual form and contents of the game was left to the influence of voluntary associations, local communities and often custom. The matter was one of social control. This was defined in middle class terms of 'respectability' and threats to 'public order'. The aim of this module is to explore the nature of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how it was detected and prevented and how those found guilty of offences were punished.

The nature of crime

There has been an unprecedented growth of academic research and publications in the history of crime[1]. Until recently, most books dealing with crime tended to be 'popular' rather than narrowly 'academic' and concentrated on particular, notorious events or personalities and many depended on largely anecdotal and literary sources[2]. Since the 1970s historians have increasingly turned their attention to crime and how former societies understood it and sought to deal with it.

Some historians have made a distinction between 'real crime' such as murder, rape and theft and 'social crime' or offences that had a degree of community acceptance or that can be linked with social protest. John Rule has suggested that it is useful to think of two main types of social crime during the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century:

1. Crimes that drew collective legitimation from their protest nature. In this category he includes rioting over the high cost of food, over enclosures, recruiting for the army or navy or over turnpike tolls.
2. Crime that, though actions against the law, were not regarded as criminal by those who committed them. 'Perks' or the appropriation of things from the workplace became increasingly the object of criminal prosecution by employers in the nineteenth century. Poaching fell into the same category. The poor did not look upon it as a crime[3]: 'they almost universally look upon game, when in a wild state, as not being the property of any individual.'

The degree to which the state criminalises certain types of behaviour and not others has always been a matter of debate. The traditional view is that humanitarian reformers like Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir James Mackintosh gradually created an awareness both inside and outside Parliament that England's Bloody Code needed drastic revision. While such men stressed the barbarity of the legal code, other reformers like John Howard paved the way for improvement in the prison system. This picture fitted well with the Whig idea of history as progress. This view implies a logic that neglects the economic, social and political context of change.

Eighteenth century Parliaments tended to pass laws for local problems but gradually the government saw crime in its national context. Sir Robert Peel's reorganisation of the criminal law during the 1820s was symptomatic of this change. Yet national laws still had to be implemented at local level by local people, whose perceptions were not always the same as those in Parliament. The law may have been seen as impartial. However, it had to be interpreted and enforced by local agents who had their own assumptions, interests and prejudices and who could be, on occasions, at odds with each other.

Offenders could be brought before three main kinds of court during the nineteenth century:

1. The least serious offences or misdemeanours could be dealt with summarily by magistrates, sitting alone or in pairs on the bench, in petty sessions. The number of offences that could be tried summarily increased in the nineteenth century with the passage of the Juvenile Offenders Acts in 1847 and 1850 and the Criminal Justice Acts of 1855 and 1879. In the larger towns and cities stipendiary or paid magistrates, acting in what were increasingly referred to as 'police courts' took on more and more of the burdens of summary justice.
2. More serious offences or felonies were prosecuted on indictment and were heard at Quarter Sessions that met four times a year in both counties and corporate towns.
3. The most serious offences were tried before judges at Assizes. In the early nineteenth century there were two assizes per year held in the major county towns of most counties at Lent and during the summer. Emergencies, such as food riots or other types of public disorder, could lead to a special assize being called. The metropolitan equivalent of the assizes was the court at the Old Bailey that was holding eight sessions a year during the 1750s. In 1834 it was enlarged and re-housed in the new Central Criminal Court.

Magistrates and judges were not the only agents of the law who were called upon to interpret the law. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a new police force in Britain. The police had some discretion in identifying some behaviour as criminal or not and in deciding what action to take. It was largely victimless crimes that were open to such discretion: drunkenness, prostitution, street gaming and especially Sunday street selling.

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[1]  C. Emsley Crime and Society in England 1750-1900, Longman, 2^nd ed., 1997, 3rd ed., 2005 is the most recent general text and is worth reading in full.  It should be read in conjunction with C. Emsley Policing and its Context 1750-1870, Macmillan, 1983, his 'Crime in Nineteenth Century Britain', History Today, April 1988, V. Gattrell 'Crime, authority and the policeman-state' in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: volume 3 Social Agencies and Institutions, CUP, 1900, pp.243-310 and the older study by J.J. Tobias Crime and Industrial Society in the Nineteenth Century, Penguin, 1972.

[2] The classic case of this kind in the nineteenth century was the 'Jack the Ripper' murders in 1888.

[3] A Bedfordshire JP to the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions, Parliamentary Papers 1826-7, vi, page 34.

Grammar and public schools and universities after 1870

In the twenty-five years between the Endowed Schools Act 1869 and the appointment of the Bryce Commission to look at secondary education four main developments had taken place:

• The endowments and management of the grammar schools had been widely reformed.
• The curriculum of grammar schools had become subject to greater scrutiny and change.
• The middle class character of the schools had been further reinforced though a narrow ladder had begun to be erected for the recruitment of a small number of working class children to the secondary system.
• Secondary education for middle class girls had made considerable advances.

In spite of the reforms, however, many schools remained insecure. The Bryce Commission found in the 1890s many of them, mainly smaller schools, were prone to fluctuating numbers and decline. It was the question of access to secondary schools that was on the point of becoming a major issue. The Education Act 1902 was central to the process of change for grammar schools.

The Endowed Schools Commissioners had power to make provision for girls and was widely used by them. By the time of their demise in 1874 they had made schemes creating 27 schools for girls; schemes for another twenty were in the pipeline. The Charity Commissioners proceeded at a much slower pace but as further 45 girls’ schools had been added by 1903. Parallel to these developments went the creation of proprietary schools for girls. In 1892 a Girls’ Public Day School Company was formed and by 1880 it had opened eleven schools in London and eleven elsewhere. A handful of new girls’ schools, such as Cheltenham, Wycombe Abbey and Roedean, were boarding, modelling themselves more or less on boys’ public schools; but the vast majority were day schools.

The elementary and endowed and private school systems remained broadly defined by the criteria of social class. It is not surprising that the public schools managed to maintain their social identity though criticisms continued to be levelled against their traditions and preoccupation with games and athleticism. The public schools perpetuated an aristocratic element in English education and the proprietary and endowed schools continued to uphold it as an educational ideal. The sons of the expanding commercial and industrial middle classes were trained in the older traditions and codes of gentlemen, an education that left them ill prepared for their role in an increasingly competitive world. Modern subjects were often left optional and between 1860 and 1880 games became compulsory, organised and eulogised at all the leading public schools. There was no overall change in their structure, objectives or curriculum until after 1918.

Higher education after 1870

The vast growth in and attempt to systematise secondary education was paralleled by a significant, though relatively small, growth and innovation in the university sector. Higher education was still only accessible to a tiny minority. There were changes in the composition of the university population, in the structure of university government and in the curriculum.

1. The 1870s saw the arrival at Oxford and Cambridge both of Nonconformists and of women. The 1871 legislation abolishing university tests untied both undergraduate places and fellowships and in the process allowed fellows to marry. The growing regiment of dons’ wives was augmented by a small file of women students. Girton and Newnham at Cambridge in the early 1870s were joined by Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s at Oxford in 1879 followed by St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s in 1886 and 1892 respectively. But numbers were small: in 1900-1 296 women students at Cambridge and 239 at Oxford compared to 2,880 and 2,537 male students respectively. Women did not become full members of the university in Oxford until 1919 and in Cambridge until 1948 whereas they were admitted to all the University of London degrees in 1878.
2. The Royal and Statutory Commissions of the 1850s had begun the process of overhauling college statutes and strengthening the central organs of university government. This was continued in the 1870s but the more ambitious plans were spoiled by the fall in colleges’ income brought about by the agricultural depression. At the same time, a reassertion of control over teaching and pastoral responsibilities by many colleges counter-balanced such trends towards centralisation very powerfully.
3. The breaches in the dominance of Classics and Mathematics towards the end of the 1840s continued and in the early 1870s separate courses in History and Law emerged and the 1890s saw the arrival of courses in English and Modern Languages. Parallel to this was the emergence of research as a systematic postgraduate activity.

Changes in Oxbridge, however, were only a pale reflection of the changes outside it. By 1900 there were more students, women as well as men, in higher education in Great Britain outside than within Oxford and Cambridge. The sequence of foundations was as follows: Newcastle 1871; University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 1872; Leeds 1874; Mason College, Birmingham 1874; Bristol 1876; Firth College, Sheffield 1879; Liverpool 1881; Nottingham 1881; Cardiff 1883; Bangor 1883; Reading 1892; Southampton 1902.  Many of these institutions began by taking external London degree examinations before seeking Royal Charters to enable them to grant their own degrees.

Other institutions, often also exploiting the external London examining umbrella, grew in London itself: medical schools attached to the teaching hospitals; in South Kensington the Royal School of Mines, the Royal College of Science and the Central Technical College formed the great Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1907; the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895; and the women’s colleges, Bedford [1849], Westfield [1882] and Royal Holloway [1886]. But the University of London only acquired a teaching as well as an examining role in 1899, following the University of London Act 1898 that brought all these and other institutions together in a complex and uneasy federation. By 1900-1 full-time students outside Oxford and Cambridge totalled almost 8,000 in England and a further 1,250 in Wales.

Funding the civil university movement proved problematic and most universities were operating on a shoe-string compared to the endowments of Oxbridge. In individual cases, university colleges benefited from the generosity of local business: in Birmingham, for example, the Chamberlains played a central role. But this was not enough. From 1839 the University of London had a small recurrent grants in recognition of the imperial and colonial as well as the domestic function of its examining role. In 1883-4 the Welsh parliamentary lobby succeeded in securing short-term grant aid for the three Welsh colleges; and in 1880 the Treasury finally conceded the principle of grant aid to the English institutions outside Oxbridge. By 1906 direct Treasury grants to universities amounted to £100,000.

The full-time student population in all English and Welsh universities in 1914 only accounted for one per cent of the age group. Universities still catered for an elite. The advance of the new professional middle classes gradually reduced the dominance of the landed gentry and clergy. And outside Oxbridge, by 1914, the children of the lower middle classes and skilled artisans were beginning to appear.

Some conclusions

The development of education between 1830 and 1914 was largely a reflection of the class basis of English society. The working classes, if they were schooled at all before 1870, went to elementary schools. The middle classes filled the grammar schools while the public schools remained the preserve of the upper classes. There were links between these three stages, a situation made more obvious after 1902 and the ‘free-place’ system, but movement from elementary school to grammar school was the exception rather than the rule. Children of all classes and of both sexes were better educated in 1914 than in 1830 but this did not have any real impact on the class bias of that education. Education mirrored the pyramidal nature of society rising to the one per cent who received a university education by 1914.

The growing intervention by the state, first with grants to voluntary schools and then with its school boards and local education authorities, marked a recognition that education for all was increasingly seen as a social service not something that ought to be provided by religious and voluntary organisations. The policy-making initiative moved from localities to central government. Acceptable standards were imposed from the centre and administered locally. Education was finally perceived as being too important to be left to chance.

Education and the state 1870-1914

Forster’s Education Act did not provide universal, free or compulsory education, but it did allow for the glaring deficiencies in English education to be removed[1]. Before 1870 the system was characterised as one of state subsidy of voluntary education, the period after by state supplementation of voluntary education. Board schools and voluntary schools existed side by side, in theory complementary, in practice in competition. The 1870 Act was a compromise that tried to make use of and not destroy existing educational resources. It did not solve the problem of elementary schooling overnight and it took a further thirty years to make a national system of elementary schools fully a reality.

Extending Forster

Religious squabbling continued in the elections for School Boards and in the attempts, particularly by Anglicans in county areas, to forestall the imposition of the School Boards. Initially the advantage lay with the existing voluntary schools and even by 1880 only one sixth of children were in board schools but the potential for growth lay with School Boards and by 1900 54 per cent of the elementary school population were in their schools.

1. Many of the larger boroughs imposed bye-laws making education compulsory, that in turn increased revenue, since grants were still related to attendance, and it was partly as a means of helping the rural voluntary schools that Disraeli’s ministry turned its attention to compulsion. For these schools, Lord Sandon the Vice-President, told the Cabinet in 1875 it was a matter of ‘life or death’. The result, in 1876, was Sandon’s Education Act that set up School Attendance Committees and placed the responsibility for ensuring attendance firmly on parents. It also gave voluntary schools the right to make attendance compulsory.
2. Various loopholes were removed by the incoming Liberal ministry that by Mundella’s Education Act 1880 made attendance compulsory for children between five and ten.
3. This inevitably sharpened the debate about fees, that averaged about 3d per week per child and many School Boards waived the fee for needy children. The Fee Grant Act 1891 virtually established free elementary education and by 1895 only about one-sixth of the five million needy elementary children were paying fees.
4. The availability of free education through School Boards made it easier to integrate pauper children into the general education system. An Act of 1873 had made school attendance a condition of outdoor relief for children, an option that had been open to guardians since Denison’s Act of 1855 had empowered guardians to pay school fees. By 1900 the vast majority of Unions sent children to their local board school and so the distinctive badge of pauperism was gradually removed.
5. The pernicious effects of payment by results were removed. The system had been severely criticised by the Cross Commission that reported in 1888 and in the 1890 Code grants for examinable attainments in the 3Rs were abolished.

It is important to recognise the achievements that resulted from the 1870 Act:

• The figures for the final decades of the century show the almost complete elimination of illiteracy as measured from parish registers. The gains were greater for women than men. Had it not been for the 1870 Act progress in literacy would have slowed down simply because illiteracy was concentrated in those classes and regions that were hardest to provide for under the voluntary system. The 1870 Act was responsible for the mopping-up operation by providing more school places and improvements in attendance and length of school life.
• There were certainly improvements in attendance but by 1897 it was still only just over eighty per cent. Legislation helped but machinery of enforcement was necessary. The main pressure was that of the attendance officer [commonly called the ‘board man’] and ultimately a summons. This did not always prove effective and authorities were often unwilling to prosecute or convict parents especially in rural areas where cheap child labour was essential for farmers and parents. The Agricultural Children Act 1873 was intended to improve attendance, but fines were so low if imposed at all.
• The quality of literacy was governed by things other than directly educational ones. The factory legislation of the late 1860s and 1870s encompassed children in industries not covered before. From the 1870s future patterns of leisure and holidays began to take rudimentary form. New skilled and semi-skilled occupations were being created and white-collar occupations were expanding. Literacy was essential in all of these areas.

The 1870 Act itself made access to higher-than-elementary education inevitably a more prominent issue. Apart from evening and adult education, such access became available mainly in two ways: the evolution of a higher stage within the elementary system, and the scholarship ladder from the elementary school to the grammar school.

The Education Act 1902 and after

By 1900 important factors were altering attitudes towards the pattern of education as it had evolved since 1870:

• The elementary system had produced what seemed to many people to be pseudo-secondary features in its higher-grade schools and evening classes. The still insecure basis of very many grammar schools was in many cases being eroded by these developments.
• The board schools were outpacing the voluntary schools. Many were in serious financial difficulties in a period of declining church attendance. The voluntary agencies were divided on the desirability of further state aid and intervention.
• State intervention was in society generally being more actively advocated and tolerated. The 1895 Bryce Commission recommended the creation of a central authority for education and a Board of Education was created in 1899.
• Local councils also entered the education field mainly under the Technical Instruction Acts as competitors of the school boards.

Such changes threatened the uneasy 1870 settlement. School boards came under fire before the end of the century, particularly for their higher-grade schools and what the church party considered excessive expenditure of ratepayers’ money. Leading Conservatives, especially Sir John Gorst, attacked the boards and attempted to reduce their powers or transfer their powers to the county and county borough councils. The boards themselves, nonconformist and labour bodies expressed hostility to such moves and defended their record.

Sir Robert Morant, who became Gorst’s private secretary in 1899 and permanent secretary of the Board of Education from 1903, was able to engineer a test case in which London school board expenditure on high elementary classes was disallowed by the district auditor, Cockerton, in 1899. The Cockerton judgement allowed Morant and Gorst to achieve a dual objective: the prevention of further post-elementary developments in board schools and the possibility of using the councils as all embracing educational authorities. In drafting the new education bill Morant was able to bring elementary and secondary education under one authority and at the same time bring relief to the voluntary schools.

The debate on the education bill, steered by the Prime Minister A.J.Balfour through Parliament, saw a stalwart defence of the board schools. However, the separate administration of board schools, grammar schools, Science and Art Department grants, technical instruction committees and the independent management of voluntary elementary schools were chaotic. The creation of new council education authorities would overcome this. It was, however, the notion of ‘Church schools on the rates’ that provoked the most fierce and lasting resistance especially from Nonconformists[2].

The most far-reaching effect of the 1902 Act was its influence on the structure of elementary and secondary education. It did not make it mandatory for local authorities to provide secondary education but it did require them to perform the functions previously performed by the school boards and the technical instruction committees. The result of this was a massive expansion in the physical provision of secondary schooling in the years up to 1914. The government did not neglect the question of access for elementary school pupils to the new fee-charging secondary schools. The Free Place Regulations of 1907 made available enhanced government grants to all secondary schools prepared to offer a quarter of their places without fees to ex-elementary school pupils. Would-be ‘free placers’ were expected to sit a simple qualifying examination. Pressure of numbers soon made this as ferociously competitive as any of the existing scholarship tests. By 1912 49,120 children, 32 per cent of the total population of maintained secondary schools, were ‘free placers’.

The Boer War [1899-1902] revealed the extent of ‘physical deterioration’ when a government committee investigated the causes of the poor physical condition of potential recruits. The need for developments in child health, orchestrated by Morant and Margaret McMillan, was legislation in 1906 and 1907 and in setting up a medical department of the Board of Education. Free school meals and medical inspections were a further attack on the existing poor law system as well as a major advance in the role of the state in education.

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[1] B. Simon Education and the Labour Movement 1870-1920, Lawrence and Wishart, 1979 is perhaps the broadest account of developments after 1870. J.S. Hurt Schooling and the Working Class 1860-1918, Routledge, 1979 is excellent on the 1870 Education Act and after and Gillian Sutherland Policy-Making in Elementary Education 1870-1895, Oxford University Press, 1973 is fundamental on the changing nature of policy and priorities.

[2] This influenced the landslide return to power of the reforming Liberal government at the end of 1905.

The 1870 Education Act

The Elementary Education Act 1870 created school boards for those parts of England and Wales in that there were insufficient school places for working class children. These boards possessed power to enforce the attendance of their pupils. Ten years later this power became a duty that devolved also on the school attendance committee, a body created under an act of 1876 in the non school-board areas. The idea of compulsory education was not new. Certain groups of children had been forced, under a variety of legislation that included the Factory Acts, the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Acts and the Poor Law Acts[1], to attend school before 1870 but the numbers involved were comparatively small. What was new about the legislation of the 1870s was the extent of its operation. For the first time the nation’s children had to attend school on a full-time basis for a minimum of five years, a period that extended to nine for many by 1914.

The new laws had an important effect on the working class way of life. No longer could parents take for granted the services of their children in the home and their contributions to the family budget. Traditional working class patterns of behaviour continued in defiance of the law. The state had interfered with the pattern of family life by coming between parent and child, reducing family income and imposing new patterns of behaviour on both parent and child.

Background to reform

The 1870 Act is best treated as a culmination of thirty years’ struggle. Two elements of this struggle were the religious problem and the system of payment by results. The main elements of the religious problem were as follows:

The root of the religious problem was the firm belief that any education ought to have a moral and therefore a religious base. This raised the question—which religion? There had been rivalry between Anglicans and Nonconformists since the 1810s and with the creation of the Roman Catholic Poor School Committee in 1847, this had become a three-way contest. As long as the provision of schools was considered a voluntary, charitable activity, the societies could co-exist. But any attempt to establish education as the responsibility of the state, and thus spend public money on it, created acute tensions. Anglicans, as members of the Established Church, claimed that any national system must be Anglican-based, a claim fiercely resisted by Nonconformists and Catholics. As the events of the 1830s and 1840s show, each side was able to mobilise enough support to prevent successive governments from taking any large-scale action.

Some of the conflict and bitterness was due to the social and political divisions that underlay and reinforced sectarian and theological disputes. By the 1840s the Anglican Church had become a monopoly bitterly resented by its rivals: a national institution identified with a class. Many Anglican clergymen regarded education crudely as a means of social control. In this they were at one with the bulk of a Tory party that had frustrated Whig efforts in 1839-40 to establish a national non-denominational system and that fought hard for the interests of the Church during the long debates in 1870. Paradoxically, the provisions of the 1870 Act had the effect of allying the Catholics and the Anglicans and thus, up to a point, to the Tories. Voluntary schools were to be in competition with the new board schools and Catholics were implacably opposed to this.

Nonconformists naturally ranged themselves behind the Whigs and then the Liberals. However, at no point did they constitute a majority of Whig or Liberal supported. They were never more than a vigorous pressure group within the party that, after 1867, was led by William Gladstone who in 1838 had been ‘desirous of placing the education of the people under the efficient control of the clergy’. By 1870 he was prepared to accept the need for some government action on a non-denominational basis but refused, as did the majority of the Liberal party, to act against the voluntary schools. It was impossible to devise a bill that would have satisfied both sides.

The system known as payment by results was a mid-Victorian attempt to introduce the principle of the free market into elementary education. Grants were extended during the 1840s and 1850s and schools were inspected to see that they were not abused. By 1861 they had reached £813,441 and had become a source of anxiety in some quarters. Any attempt to devise a national system of schools, and not comply aid the existing voluntary schools raised the question of whether the existing way of helping schools were not too grandiose and expensive to extend to the whole country. The Newcastle Commission recommended the creation of local boards of education in areas where the voluntary principle was weak. This proposal that would founder on the rock of the religious problem. It also recommended the power to award grants on the basis of examination performance leading to the Revised Code of 1862 and payment by results.

Reform: a central perspective

Whatever its justification, the voluntary principle did not prove a success in promoting schools. Even many of the extreme Nonconformists were coming round to the view that voluntarism had been given a fair trial and had failed. The Congregationalist Education Union, that had originated in the 1840s to oppose state education, was wound up in 1867 and the symbolic acceptance of defeated was registered when the great voluntaryist Edward Baines accepted the practical case for state education. The Newcastle Commission and the controversies over the Revised Code are important because they reinforced the public interest in the subject that had been growing since the 1850s but that was not embodied in legislation until 1870. Religion was one reason for the late growth of a national system of education but there were others:

• There was a lack of a real parliamentary and administrative will to address the problems that did exist.
• There was an absence of a structure of local government that would provide the indispensable local agencies. Municipal corporations had been reformed in 1835 but their powers were limited and their influence small. In the counties elected councils were not established until 1888.

There were serious administrative problems in involving the state in popular education:

1. But local rate support would certainly bring demands for local control that was bound to raise the denominational issue
2. There was the growing problem of expense that the Revised Code was supposed to have resolved.
3. This was combined with the tension that, since education was a local service, it ought to be financed from the local rate. This proposal was a central feature of the National Public School Association founded in 1850.

The final problem was one of timing. The education issue took up a good deal of parliamentary time in the mid-fifties. In 1855, for example, there were three bills before Parliament. All were withdrawn. It was not a period when the state was likely to move into a major new area of social policy because the government was tending to restrict its activities in central planning. The 1850s was the decade of administrative reform with reformers planning to achieve economies rather than extend the range of government activity.

Elementary education was an area where national policies were greatly influenced by local initiatives, beginning first in Manchester and later in Birmingham. The National Public School Association formed in 1850 had the support of Richard Cobden and, among others, a young Bradford manufacturer named W.E.Forster who later carried the 1870 Act through the Commons. It campaigned for public, rate-supported, non-denominational education during the 1850s but ran out of steam after a 1857 bill failed to become law.

During the 1860s opinion in cities became increasingly concerned about the large numbers of children who were not in school. The Social Science Association argued, as a result of an extensive survey, that in every 100 children living with parents and not at work, 40 were at school and 60 were not. Their conclusion was that only compulsory education could deal with the apathy of parents and the inadequacy of the voluntary system. Education bills were introduced in 1867 and 1868. The 1868 bill was withdrawn when it was clear that a general election was imminent. When Gladstone formed his new government, Forster became Vice-President of the Committee of Council for Education, the man who spoke for education in the Commons.

Evidence of the defective educational provision was beginning to accumulate. The first and second reports of the Royal Commission on children’s employment in agriculture brought out the poor state of education in the countryside. It was clear that the half-time system could not be introduced into agricultural work. Manchester was not the only major city to reveal its deficiencies. Very similar conclusions were reached by the Birmingham Education Society, founded in 1867, and the House of Commons return on the state of education in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool in 1869 showed that many children were attending no school at all and that the private schools were very inefficient.

1. The Reform Act 1867 enfranchised the urban working class. Both Disraeli and Gladstone accepted that self-improvement and rising levels of literacy were, in part, a justification for this development. There is, however, some debate on the degree to which reform in 1867 led to educational reform in 1870. Robert Lowe’s statement that ‘we must now educate our masters’ has to be seen as partly rhetoric but it raise the issue of parental non-consumers and the degree to which they should be coerced into sending their children to school. It has been argued that the extension of education in 1870 was a matter of social policy not one of political necessity.
2. The leadership that had long rested with Manchester now passed to Birmingham. Education was one of the major interests of the Birmingham municipal reformers and in 1869 they created the National Education League with George Dixon as President and Joseph Chamberlain as Chairman of the committee. The League was a national movement that carried on the ideas of the National Public School Association and represented the non-sectarian and Nonconformist view of the way ahead. In November 1869 the National Education Union was founded in Manchester with the protection of the interests of denominational schools as its primary objective.

Forster introduced the bill in February 1870 and it became law on 9 August. It did not design a new national system. It left the existing voluntary schools untouched with the same committees of managers.

• Where the existing school provision was inadequate or where a majority of ratepayers demanded it, school boards should be set up for boroughs and parishes with a single board for the whole of London, with the duty of building the schools that were necessary.
• These boards were to be elected triennially in the boroughs by the burgesses and in parishes by ratepayers, and were given the power to issue a precept on the rating authority to be paid out of the local rate.
• The religious question was resolved by allowing schools provided by the boards to be non-sectarian [the so-called Cowper-Temple clause] but giving parents the right to withdraw their children from any religious observance or instruction.
• Elementary education was not made free and school boards might make it compulsory for children to attend school. This was not extended to the voluntary schools. The Act essentially filled in the gaps.

The main feature of the debate was the major division of opinion not between Conservatives and Liberals but within the Liberal majority itself. The Conservatives on the whole supported the bill, though they disagreed over some issues. The original proposals were considerably modified by the Radical Nonconformist wing of the Liberal party, many of them recently elected MPs, who wanted to go further in a number of directions that the government had planned:

1. Some Radicals were strong Nonconformists who advocated the disestablishment of the Church of England. Prominent in this group was Edward Miall, a former Independent minister who had founded The Nonconformist in 1841 and who was a leading figure in the Society for the Liberation of the Church from State Patronage and Control [or Liberation Society for short]. A Welsh MP with similar views was Henry Richard who pointed out the particular difficulties raised by the religious situation in Wales and the dislike of the Welsh people for Anglican teaching in schools. They argued that school instruction should be entirely secular so that religious agencies would be left to do their work outside schools.
2. The pressures were not all from the religious side. Compulsory education was strongly advocated by the Cambridge economist Henry Fawcett and by Sir Charles Dilke, whose main contribution to the final act was to propose that the ratepayers should elect the school boards. Free education, part of the programme of the National Education League, was little discussed and an amendment in favour of it soundly defeated.

Board schools with rates as well as government grants to drawn on had the resources to grow. Voluntary schools had no source of local income comparable to rates. There was no way in which they could keep pace. In this sense the settlement of 1870 carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. By the 1890s it was clear that provision for elementary education was uneven and annually growing more so. Nor was the structure one on to which any provision for secondary education could be grafted. The Education Act 1902 put the Church on the rates. School Boards were abolished and, in return for rate aid, voluntary schools’ committees of management came within the control of the new Local Education Authorities, county and county borough councils, some 140 of them.

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[1] After 1832 a series of acts shored up, but did not radically modify, the voluntary school system. The Industrial Schools Acts of 1857, 1861 and 1866; the Reformatory Schools Acts of 1854, 1857 and 1866 and the Education of Pauper Children Act of 1862 all helped local authorities to tackle the problem of the education of the 'residuum', the class the voluntary schools had neglected. When these efforts of pre-1867 parliaments had failed and the voluntary system had lost credence as the means of educating the children of the nation, then and only then, did the 1870 Act belatedly and reluctantly 'fill the gaps'.

Educating Women

The education of women and girls had been an issue in England since the 1790s[1]. Certain social pressures gave the claims of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, that equality of education with boys was a means of securing independence for women, an extra urgency by 1850:

1. Women were still less educated than men. Female literacy rates in 1851 were still only 55 per cent compared to nearly 70 per cent for men.
2. The proportion of women in the population was steadily rising from 1,036 females per 1,000 males in 1821 to 1,054 per 1,000 in 1871. This meant that there was a surplus of women over men and accordingly over a quarter of a million women had little expectation of marriage and the lifetime protection of husband and home. This situation was exacerbated by the rising age of marriage that also left more single women waiting for, and often not achieving, marriage.
3. With more women detached in their expectations from reliance on parents or putative husbands and children, they were forced to think in terms of earning their own living in a career. This brought the education issue to the forefront of feminist thinking.

The education of women was a class-based as that of boys.

1. Well-to-do girls were educated at home or in small academies in 1830. The academic content was low and, with the transformation of the grammar schools, girls found themselves excluded from establishments they had attended in the eighteenth century.
2. Lower class girls attended the National or British schools along with boys and were destined, if not for the drudgery of a working class marriage, then for factory work or the vast army of domestic service. The education girls received before 1870 was very similar to that followed by boys, with the probable addition of some sewing and knitting. The concern to develop a more distinctive curriculum with a focus on domestic science, cooking, laundry and needlework came after 1870 and especially in the 1880s and 1890s.
3. The problem in the 1840-70 period was largely a middle class one of finding careers for unmarried middle class ladies and of fashioning an education that would fit them for it. Existing careers were limited in 1850 and becoming a governess was the only means of earning a living for women of gentle birth. In 1851 there were some 25,000 governesses in England but they had no proper training and often an education barely above the accomplishments. Moreover there were uneasy status incongruities: hired to impart ladylike qualities to her charges, the governess by taking paid employment forfeited her own status as a lady.
4. The gender nature of elementary education can be seen after the 1870 Education Act with the curriculum for girls stressing 'domestic skills’.

The Governesses’ Benevolent Institution was formed in 1843 to help active governesses seek positions and aged ones to live in retirement. They tackled the central problem of education by founding Queen’s College in 1848 with an academic curriculum that developed sciences and languages as well as basic subjects and accomplishments [drawing, music, dancing, and needlework]. A similar institution, Bedford College, was opened in 1849. Pupils from these colleges influenced many areas of feminist life in the 1860s and 1870s: The English Woman’s Journal, the Social Science Association, the early suffrage and married women’s property movements all stemmed from them. Ex-Queen’s students dominated many areas of feminist development, for example, Sophia Jex Blake, the first English doctor and Octavia Hill, the social work pioneer. But most important were Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

Dorothea Beale and her friend Frances Mary Buss created respectively the girls’ public boarding school and the girls’ grammar school. In 1858 Miss Beale took over the recently founded Cheltenham Ladies College and turned it into the model of the high-quality girls’ boarding school. St Leonards and Roedean were founded after 1870 based on its example. Miss Buss’ North London Collegiate School began in 1850 in Camden Town to meet the problem of the lack of education for middle class girls. She believed in the important of home life in the upbringing of girls and it deliberately remained a day school. In both institutions the curriculum included subjects like science and Latin. Both institutions might have remained unique in their own areas had not feminist educators brought two powerful factors into play:

• Public examinations were opened to girls. Oxford and Cambridge had started Local Examinations for boys’ schools in 1858 providing an external common standard. The Victorians placed great stress on examinations as a means of raising academic performance and deciding the fitness of candidates for public office. Feminists saw that without the standard demanded of boys the new academic girls’ education would not be taken seriously. Emily Davies, the future founder of Girton College and sister of a Principal of Queen’s College, urged Cambridge to admit girls to its Locals, that it did experimentally in 1863. Miss Buss sent 25 candidates and following this success Local school examinations were formally opened to girls by Cambridge, Edinburgh and Durham universities in 1865 and 1866 and Oxford followed suit in 1870.
• Girls’ education was strengthened and spread after it secured financial aid through endowments. In the 1860s the Taunton Commission examined the issue of endowments for grammar schools. Feminists saw this as another crucial opportunity. Emily Davies insisted the Commission should examine girls’ education and she, and Miss Beale and Miss Buss, gave evidence before it and Miss Beale edited the volume of the report devoted to girls. The result was the Endowed Schools Act 1869 and the creation of the Endowed Schools Commissioners to reform grammar school endowments. They created 47 new grammar schools between 1869 and 1875 and their successors, the charity Commission, created another 47 after 1875. The North London Collegiate gained an endowment from the reorganisation.

The early movement for higher education for girls and its outcome occupied the 1860s. The prime mover was Emily Davies. She wanted higher education for women to widen the range of occupations open to them, fit them for public life, raise the standard of teaching in girls’ schools, advance the cause of women’s suffrage and match the experience of France, Germany and Italy where women were accepted into universities. She took a house in Hitchen in 1869 to prepare girls for Cambridge examinations and in 1873 moved to Cambridge itself as Girton College. At the same time Anne Clough moved to Cambridge in 1871 to set up what was to become Newnham College. Owens College in Manchester admitted women in 1869. This was followed by London in 1878 and Oxford in 1879. These events were of great importance in their timing since when the civic university movement began in the 1870s they accepted the admission of women as a normal policy.

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[1] June Purvis A History of Women's Education in England, Open University Press, 1991 covers the period between 1800 and 1914 and is the best introduction to the subject.